The Fangirl and The Firebender
by HVK
Summary: Zuko is transported into the world of Total Drama, and unexpectedly is tracked down by Sierra, who inexplicably demonstrates the power of Firebending and wants some answers about it. And then there's the question of how he GOT there to begin with...


If there's one thing I like, it's crackfic. Well-_written _crackfic, but at this point of my writing abilities, it's mainly what I do! And there's little I love more in the world than a great crossover. Not to mention unusual crossovers. _Espicially _unusual crossovers.

And the main point of them for me is the interaction between characters from utterly different series. And, with that in mind, it came over me to have my favorite characters from two shows I quite like meet: Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Sierra from the Total Drama series. (How are you supposed to refer to that series, anyway? Total Drama Series. Total Drama Island? It is a mystery only the enlightened may know...or the Truth from Fullmetal Alchemist. But don't ask him, he charges an arm and a leg for his knowledge. Literally.)

So I wrote this. The way I see it, if a story you like just won't get written, you ought to do it yourself! You might inspire someone else to do likewise, and that's pretty awesome. And incidentally, it also concerns a few other ideas I've had knocking about.

Disclaimer: Avatar: The Last Airbender/Total Drama series is copyrighted Bryke and Nickolodean/Teletoon and Fresh TV.

...

_A single candle can ignite a thousand more._

...

Sierra loved investigating weird stuff.

She wasn't _quite _a amatuer paranormal investigator just yet, though it was a hobby that children in her town were expected to take up sooner or later. She was a lot older for the idea to take, having spent much of her time previously occupied with the affairs of celebrities and TV dramas, but spending a season as part of one had cooled her off on the whole thing, and she was sufficiently obsessive enough to delve it into other, more interesting forms to keep herself busy.

Otherwise, she didn't really have a reason to do it. Really, there _was_ no reason for her to do it, and she didn't need a reason. It was good, it was fun and none were hurt, and so she was satisfied with it. And in truth, no one local cared much. She was their most famous resident, a real hometown celebrity, and she was given a touch more license that she perhaps should have been allowed, but in truth it wasn't exactly something unusual for the town.

Only in the town of Moose Jaw, a place in a part of Canada called Saskatchewan, could the famous (or perhaps _in_famous) former reality TV contestant not truly be unusual by local standards. (They thought she was a bit weird about things, but that was the extent of their condemnation.)

It was, all things considered, a weird town to begin with, and it wasn't _that _odd that Sierra could have been born there. Moose Jaw was subject to all manner of weirdness, ranging from the fairly subtle (people wandering out of nowhere who swore they were from other worlds and had the means to prove it), the more distinct (aliens touring the shops while wearing bad disguises) and the more extreme cases that indicated that reality just wasn't trying anymore (that one time last week when a giant monster had wandered in from New Zealand, gotten entrapped in a literal tourist trap and had only barely escaped, much to the disappointment of local children that had plotted to tame it as a superweapon to conquer the world).

It would be presumption to say that anything could happen there. It _was _more precise to suggest that anything that happened there, if weird enough, would be accepted by the town with genteel indifference. They'd seen it all before.

So, one late evening, any attentive observer would have seen her unusually tall and large frame lugging about a battery-powered belt sander in an attempt to get the attention of any hairy ape-men of the woods. (she'd gotten the idea about belt sanders from a fellow researcher of the paranormal on the Internet; he swore he'd found Bigfoot in his garage but no one believed him. She sympathized.) It was, she was sure, a good idea. She'd _seen _yetis and such before during her time on Total Drama World Tour, and she figured that catching one as part of a grand plan of civilizing it, teaching it proper English and eventually installing it as the Prime Minister would be a good start for her new hobby.

She thought she'd spotted one, lured by the tell-tale noise of a belt-sander, loud enough to attract a fashion-conscious ape-man (or annoy the neighbors), only to discover that it was an inappropiately designed scarecrow someone had tried to spear through a tree for some daft reason. "Aw," She said, not really put out. "I wish I'd seen how _that _happened. I bet it'd be exciting. Nothing exciting ever happens to me. Aside from the reality TV thing and blowing up an airplane, but that was more painful than exciting." She fingered a few stray bangs of her still too-short dark hair pensievely. "Why doesn't anything _really _exciting ever happen to me!"

And, as a genre savvy girl like her _really _should have known, saying something like that while in the middle of nowhere is just asking for calamity.

Sierra stood still, balancing the belt-sander on her side without any apparent effort (There wasn't any. She was very strong.) and looked up at the sky, frowning slightly. The air felt...different, like something had changed. And there was a faint distortion, as though of something invisible yet leaving a trace of it's passage in the air-

There was, without more warning then the things she had just noticed, a brilliant light welling out of the sky, like a tiny sun in mid-air. It was so startling, unexpected and bright that she closed her eyes reflexively, holding a hand to her face to ward away the glare.

Sierra heard..._something_. She felt disturbingly wobbly, the ground under her feet shifting in ways she didn't understand and something felt _off_, a halfway-feeling of being _here _and also _there_ at once. For the blink of an instant, she heard whispers upon the wind, the faintest rumblings of earth and the splash of water on the sea, and louder than them all was the crackling of fire, the roar of thunder; she could hear them all, the vaugest hints of something _other_, something that had just noticed her.

She could feel a massive surge of _something_, like the world's biggest electrical current but non-lethal, flowing right through her, but not specifically her. The ground churned with energy, an indefinible swell surging from all around and coming from someplace _else_, from where she couldn't guess-

(_for the briefest of instants, she _is _someone else, long enough for her to see the flames that burn without pain, that blaze without fuel, and to see a massive reptilian face bigger than the world and made of a holy fire, a face fierce and yet kind, and for a moment it seems politely...puzzled, if you can believe it, and she does not hear it speak but she _feels _a massive heat that resonates inside her, and there is a sudden thought of _belonging_, of being drawn to something and it is _good_-)_

There was a blast of sound, and light, and Sierra coughed, feeling sparks clashing against her teeth _(where did that come from?_) and paused.

The light was gone. All was as it had been before. At least, if you didn't notice the boy lying on the floor, dark-haired and dressed all in red and black.

Sierra dropped the belt sander, her eyes widening with interest. This was a surprise, she thought. "Hello?" She said, unsure of what else to do. The proper social customs seemed a bit out of her experience.

The boy didn't appear to notice her; he got up, slowly and carefully, shifting his weight in such a way that suggested that he was feeling a bit ill. "Ugh," He muttered in what sounded like perfectly sensible English. "Fine, I got it, stop messing around with weird ruins..."

Sierra tilted her head, tapping her ears in puzzlement. What the boy was saying, whatever he was saying, she hadn't really _heard _it. It had passed through her ears, but there had been an odd doubling sensation, like she'd heard something but her brain had translated it for her. "Uh, hello?" She said again.

The boy stood up, startled, and half-turned towards her, his face in profile. He looked vaugely Asian, his dark hair long for a boy and distinctly uncared for, falling over his face in an untidy mass; she tried not to scream, or gasp or show any surprise at the horrific sight of his face; it was horribly burned, a pinkish mass of bumpy ridges and rigid folds squeezing up his face, pulling the slide of his mouth into a slight sneer, his ear no more than a sad twist of flesh and his eye half-shut from nerve paralysis and muscle damage.

She put a hand to her mouth to stifle anything she might say. The boy didn't approve of this, she could tell that much by the mean quirk of his lips (she hurredly focused on something else, anything else; the way his clothes reminded her of some ancient culture, the odd curl of his shoes, the red and black of his outfit, his lean and powerful muscles), and he turned more fully towards her. To her astonishment, the damage to his face was reserved for that side only, and revealed to her was an unmarred face that might have seemed only plain without the ruined side of it, but the contrast of his burn scar made him look..._beautiful_. Not handsome, his face was just too absurdly pretty.

She stared at him, more puzzled by his sudden appearance even if his looks didn't have a more-than-slight effect on her. (Not _that _much, she told herself, he was certainly no Cody.) "Huh?" She said.

"Huh?" He said back, staring back and looking even more confused than she did. He gave the wooded area and the nearby lights of town an uneasy look, as if it was all a particularily elaborate and bizarre prank. "Where _am _I?"

"Canada?" Sierra blurted out. She shivered, which wasn't unexpected. It was a pretty chilly day, and it was cold up north anyway, but she'd never really been bothered by the cold. She breathed in a bit, and without understand, she felt..._warm_, all of a sudden.

"I don't understand," The boy complained, and he _was _a boy, at least compared to Sierra. He was younger than her, anyway, maybe sixteen or so. "What just happened? Where did everybody go?"

"Um," Sierra said, perfectly confused. "Who are you talking about? Who are you, anyway?"

The boy ignored her. "_Uncle!_" He called out. "_Aang! TOPH! Katara! Sokka! UNCLE! Suki? MAI! UNCLE!_" Nothing but silence greeted him, whatever voices he'd expected completely absence. "_UNCLE! MAI!_" He yelled again. "_**UNCLE! MAI! MAI!**_"

There was no response.

"Mai?" He said again, quieter. "Uncle? Guys? _Guys_?"

Nothing answered him. Nothing but silence, and Sierra's mute witness.

"...No," The boy said. "No. No! No no no!" Trembling, he took a step forward and fell, landing on his side. He didn't get up but just crawled, digging his hands into the ground and tearing himself a long, ripping chunks of dirt and grass out. "No," He said again, pulling himself up on his knees and staring at his hands. "What...what did I do? What did I _do!_" Heat blossomed from his hands like flowers in sunlight, and Sierra saw the grass under him wilting.

He buried his face in his hands, shaking like a leaf in a storm, and she thought she could see the gleam of tears on his face. "_What did I do?_" He said again, and Sierra could feel the raw uncontrolled fury in those four little words, a roiling _wrath _just boiling in every syllable, fury enough to set the world on fire-

(_there's a fire inside him, roaring and blazing, and the heat of it seeps into the land itself. It's not a destructive fire, not something that destroys everything around it, and it's not physical either; Sierra is struck with it, her very soul sparking, all her considerable will coming to a burning focus as this spirit-fire _changes _something, and in her spirit something now _burns _like a torch-)_

Fire streamed up from around him, welling out of his flesh and screaming from his body without burning his clothes, the grass around him wiliting in seconds before the fire consumed them utterly, and that blaze came screaming right at Sierra. "Hey, stop it!" She said, feeling indignant. It seemed rude to have people shooting fire at her, and it didn't really occur to her to question the fire-shooting happening in the first place. She put a hand up in a instinctive and completely pointless gesture of protection just as something warm and good and _alive _blazed up inside her-

The fire around the boy swelled up and away from her, arcing clumsily into the sky and fading away. "Beh?" She said, her grasp of the English language briefly deserting her.

She wasn't the only one. "Who did that?" He said, surprise and confusion pulling him out of his distress. As he got and up and turned around, the flames dying away, he looked and frowned at Sierra in mild perplexity, as if only just realizing she was there.

The two of them stared at each other. Dark eyes met yellow eyes, and for a moment, there was a brief feeling of _knowing _between the two, a shared awareness of some connection neither of them could detect. Deeper than that was a feeling of _otherness_, that one was seeing someone that wasn't of their own realm.

Fire blazed in both, and they felt it's mark, even if they weren't consciously aware of doing so.

She took a step towards him, not altogether sure of what she intended to do, but it was enough to spook him; already too freaked out by whatever had happened to him, the boy ran off straight towards town, moving far faster than she would have thought anyone could (except for that one time in Africa with her and the lion) and leaving her blinking in the dust.

Sierra watched him go, thoroughly confused and even more fascinated. "Well," She said after a moment. "_That _was new." Warmth roared from within, like a fire inside her, and Sierra absently rubbed her hand, not seeing the blue embers dripping from her hand.

...

Two weeks passed after the brief (and unexpected) meeting of the two. Things are supposed to come in threes, but both of those concerned seemed fond of subverting convention.

Various things, things that were both fascinating discoveries and new depths of personal distressed, occured to both.

For her part, Sierra's curiosity soon overwhelmed any surprise the boy's sudden appearance in the world had held, and it presented an intriguing mystery to her. Fascination bordering on obsession led to investigate more thoroughly, not the least because she also had a more..._practical _reason for finding him.

One late night found her in her house, occupied by her and her single mother (the question of her father was a curious one, as Sierra's periodic question in the matter had never yielded a consistent answer from her mother), and comfortable ensconced in her room, at least as comfortably as she could be under the circumstances.

She was holed up around her media rig (as she called it on those infrequent moments when her flightly mind remembered that she had a name for it at all); it was her pride and joy, a neatly arranged array of several computers she'd lovingly selected every single component for and assembled together with painstaking forethought; those who knew her best, like her closest friend (and, Sierra dearly hoped, eventual boyfriend) Cody Anderson, or perhaps Izzy, would have been startled at how _neat _it all was. From a girl who was so intensely focused on whatever attracted her attention, it was assumed that she would simply let everything just outside of that focus drop to pieces.

She just _needed _to keep some things neat, Sierra thought furiously, a wild and fierce fire beating in her chest. There was so much she had absolutely no control over, some things she couldn't fix or make better, but at the very least she could keep her important things neat and tidy and safe, and illusions were better than the sledgehammer that world turned into just when you weren't expecting it, and it _hurt _so much when the world screwed with you just because and you knew deep in your bones that you couldn't ever change it better so you just crawled away into your secret special dream-places and made a little fort where everything was nice and happy-

Heat flared. Her fingers blazed hot and gasfire-blue and Sierra sharply pulled her fingers back, sucking her fingers out of reflex even though she wasn't hurt in the slightest.

On her desk, where her hand had been resting, there was a charred imprint of her fingers, a short-lived waft of smoke rising from it. There were many others like it.

She stared at it for a long time before turning her attention to her still-warm fingers, looking at them like they were little devil worms wearing finger-skins, jaws about to open and lunge at her eyes.

They weren't, of course. They were only fingers, strong and slightly overlarge for her hands and a bit bony at the knuckles. She could almost pretend that it was all a weird trick of the mind, just another chemical malfunction in her head, if not for the burns on the desk.

She was scared.

Sierra's attention shifted from the burn marks on the desk to her computer monitor; her internet browser was open to have a dozen pages referring to the recent phenomenon of people that wandered in from nowhere, without anyone noticing; walk by an alley with no one in there, cross there corner, and out comes a woman with confused eyes and stammered questions: _Where am I? When am I? What is this place? Canada? North America? Earth? Whatever are those things?_

People that didn't belong here, put simply. People that came from _outside_, if you gave any credence to the theories that there were thousands of other places just outside of the world, spinning and being their own little worlds, and that these people had walked in from their world's right into town for no reason. The most popular nickname for them were 'walk-ins', using the term given by a town in the state of Maine in what Sierra liked to call 'Canada's Overcoat' (meaning the United States); these walk-ins had happened down there a few years ago, and the whole thing had recently resurfaced all around the world, and Sierra's town had inexplicably become a source of it.

That boy had only been the first. And _she _had been there to see him arrive. Sierra liked to think of herself as knowing how things worked, and she knew that that wasn't just amazing timing; it was suspicious. She'd spent some time trying to figure out just _why _she had been there to see it happen, and what the connection to her own metanormal problems was, but she hadn't come up with any solutions yet.

Sierra went through a few open pages on her web browser, and eventually pulled up a picture: the boy she had met, a boy that had been (with excessm lyricism), been described that he looked like he was Japanese yet not, and fires sprang up in his footsteps and smoke issued from his breath when had had run into a burning building and sent the fire screaming into the sky and came outside with a unconscious child and three kittens.

Sierra gave at the monitor with a thoughtful look. She had written and submitted that page. She had done all the research that could be done in the circumstances, and she had just _missed _the chance to interview him, but other people did get the blessed oppertunity, and there was information in only a few words. At least enough for her to get a slight grasp on what kind of person he was. The page was an article on her blog (with a long list of comments that were mostly hateful remarks about her, crude comments abouth her weight, heated suggestions that she was a register on a sex offender register, a number of suggestions that she was genuinely psychotic and various other mean things but she was already used to things like that), and above the article (which was itself a rather sloppy if cheerful remarks about the boy's heroism and how more people ought to be that way) was a picture: a building's skeletal husk still glowing with embers, and a door broken by a single mighty kick, and there stood the boy, uneven dark hair falling to his shoulders and not quite disguising the nightmarish burn twisting the left side of his face into a semi-grimace, his sun-yellow eyes seeming to glow through the mess of his hair, his mouth bared in a stubborn grimace. Impossibly, beautifully, he was aflame, fire streaming up his entire body like the mantle of a legendary dragon-emperor returned to claim his throne, and though his clothes had been torn and charred by jagged debris, he himself was unharmed and so was the child and kittens he clutched in his arms, held close to his chest as though he wished to make himself into a meat shield against anything that could hurt them.

The article she had written, when you cut out the rambling and excessively poetic prose, described the events as she had exhaustively reserached them from the bystanders and various records of a brief interview: the foriegn boy had simply walked into a burning building, upon which the fire had jumped screaming into the sky like a reverse bolt of lightning. And he had come out, _himself_ on fire and unharmed by it, and indeed the fire rising from his body didn't harm anything at all.

When she had written that important line, Sierra had felt an increasingly familiar tingling in her fingers, an uncanny warmth. She needed to know how he had done it. When she thought about what he had done, she could feel the beginings of hope; there was more to her pursuit of the boy than her habitual curiosity.

Heat flared now, as it had then, hotter and worse than before, and she almost panicked - _be careful, BE CAREFUL, don't let it hit anything or make anything burn or the HOUSE WILL BURN -_ and only fell off her chair in a terrified heap, her hands grasping each other so hard her nails scratched her skin.

She could _feel _it, screaming up from something deeper than her bones, a heat like the sun's nuclear fire, roaring inside her and moving out any channel it could find, _fire wants to fight_-

Sierra waited it out. It felt like hours, waiting for that terrible heat to die down and leave her feeling curiously empty and cold, the flickers of red-orange light brightening to blue in some places finally fading away, laeving her with a deep-seated feeling of sickness, like she had wounded herself in some way. When she unclasped her hands, charred crisps fell from her fingertips.

It smelled so awful she gagged. There was no smell like it: nail polish, _burned _nail polish.

Like a true believer in desperate need beseeching a sainnt's image for divine intervention, Sierra looked at her article once more. Her point of pride was a transcription of an extremely brusque interview the boy had given, overheard by enough people that it had been simple to get the gist of it. There wasn't all that much to go by, but there was enough to fuel her plotting. And, not least of all, a name.

People, friends and fans and detractors alike, said that Sierra could find _anyone _if they were on the planet and they left a trail. _This _guy was good at hiding, but he wasn't particularily interested in staying hidden. Rising like a dragon one moment, all flames and indignant rage at whatever incident sparked his fury, and then gone, with only a few infuriating clues.

But those clues were _enough_. Desperation and fear brewed extreme measures, and Sierra was not a particularily rational girl to begin with.

She put together a plan.

...

The morning after that found the boy in question sitting on a rooftop to greet the sun, without a plan of his own and trying to think of something constructive to do.

He'd been having a rough few weeks, stuck in this weird land and being so out to sea that he was finding fish. (Metaphors were not his strong suit, mind you.) He'd had a rough sixteen years, actually, but at least things had made a warped sense then, and he certainly had known the way the world ought to have been and the best way for him to _make _close to that ideal as possible.

There wasn't any conceivable way for him to pull that off here. _Nothing _here was right. It was alien, and he was so very ill-suited to it, like a Foggy Swamp Waterbender dumped in the middle of a industrial sector; he understood that he was in a place where people lived, and he understood that they were doing something, but the actual nature of what they were doing was totally beyond him.

There were humans here, just like him. And yet, _not _like him. They gave him funny looks when he pointed out that the animals were weird (beasts like Earth King Kuei's bear were well-known and they didn't even _notice_), no one even _knew _a thing about the Fire Nation or Water Tribes or Earth Kingdom or Air Nomads, suggesting that he was _very _far away from home indeed. And given the downright shizophrenic levels of spirituality in this town alone (one person might be almost superstitiously so, another believing that the material was all there was), the spirits of this world were very subtle indeed.

He'd spent the past two weeks first trying to find at least one of the others, spent a brief time in total despair when he couldn't find a single _trace _of them anywhere (and really, it wouldn't be hard to find them, his friends were hardly subtle when panicked), got bored of that and went right down to finding out just where he was. He soon concluded that he wasn't anywhere in his world, not with this place as alien and futuristic and technologically-based as it was. (And, among other mysteries, there was the question of how he understood what they were saying. It was clearly a different langauge than Common from back home, he _heard _them talking in ways that was totally different than anything he'd ever heard, but it was understood regardless. He'd gotten used to it, but it was still tremendously suspicious to him. He suspected that there was a deeper mystery to the matter.)

He'd already learned that the gifts of the spirits were _not _known here. People reacted worse than Earth Kingdom bigots when they had seen him Firebending.

He sighed; he was as far away from home as he'd ever been in his life. But all the same, he couldn't deny that it was an educational experience. They had such interesting things here: boxes that displayed moving pictures. Little devices that could talk to people. Weapons that fit into your hand and fired little bits of metal with all the power of a first-rate Earthbender. Vehicles that moved faster that any animal he'd seen, huge ships that equaled the finest Fire Nation ships, and most incredible of all, massive metal things that people rode around to _fly_. It was walking around inside of a fantasy story, though one of the stranger ones. The people seemed like they had all learned how to make machines Bend bits of reality for them because they had forgotten how...or more interestingly, didn't need to. Or couldn't; it was something to look into.

The boy breathed in, out, and soft plumes of smoke suffused with embers passed his lips. In with the flow of the world, out with the rough and twisted things inside. He felt better; it might have been psychosomatic, but he put more emphasis into the sunlight. It felt _good _to take in the sun. The nights were colder than anything he'd felt outside of the Poles (was there something different here? It _felt _different) but the sun was just as warm and good as back home, if somewhat diluted. He suspected that he was somewhere far north; the climate seemed right.

He supposed he ought to be upset. His friends and family were scattered somewhere, if they were even in the same alien place as him, he was lost and completely on his own, but on the other hand, it was all a tremendous exciting experience.

But perhaps it was also the morning, wearing away the darkness acclumating like as shroud. The sunlight on him, suffusing into his skin like water into a sponge, thundering down to his spirit and leaving ripples of fire-aspected essence to pulse through him; every morning was like shoving your way out of a dark tunnel that had been a prison for years only to have the glorious light of the dawn chase away the darkness of the spirit and burn away despair, tearing spirit-shadows apart under it's light. Light, pure and elemental and beautiful, shining into his soul and quickening the pulse of the fire inside him. Sun without calling to the sun within and shining that soul-light to every corner of his mind and _burning _the darkness to nothingness...

It was beautiful. He forgot how beautiful it was, in the grim emptiness of the night hours in this too-cold strange land. To a normal person, that was poetic hyperbole; to someone like _him_, it was a perfectly honest statement. Without the sun, from which it was said all true fire was a reflection of, your fire faded away to a little spark, a tiny candle barely sufficient to keep you sane, and all the shadows of your mind crowded around, dark and sinister and cruel...it was easy to hurt, late at night, without the holy light of the sun to warm your spirit. Too easy to forget who you really were, feeling bits of your very psyche fall to ash and dust, cold and hard and dead-

And anyway, he had bad experiences at night. Terrible things had happened to him at night before (_mothers disappearing and little mad sisters whispering promises of death with Uncle's knife)_ and night had since taken on an ominous state to him.

But the day was beautiful. He liked beautiful things; a morning sunrise that painted the sky shades a master artist would be hard-pressed to even _begin _to imitate or that brief moment of glancing at a pond where the water was gleaming just right and the duck swimming in peaceable accord and sunlight bringing the world to a shining hue and your heart almost stopped because everything looked so damned _perfect_. A pair of adolescents his age, for example, walking down the sidewalk hand in hand, love burning through them and bringing their faces alive in such a way that who they really were shone out through the clay of themselves (_and it hurts when he sees that, it reminds him of the way Aang and Katara became or Sokka and Suki, and oh, it reminds him so dearly of _her _that it HURTS_) and just for a moment, he knew that the world was perfect for two people and that was good enough for him too.

He sat back, wishing he had lighter clothes so the sun could shine down harder on him. In the circumstances, he supposed that he shouldn't have felt so good. But times were always hard on him, and to yield to pessimism and grimness seemed too much like surrender.

Perhaps, he thought with a wry smirk, it was just Aang's influence. He wondered if all Air Nomads had been as ridiculously optimistic as the god-child that had become something like his closest friend.

Damn it. He _missed _having friends, and this world was so _strange_, so unlike his own, and yet similar enough to give him a headache. And he hadn't met anyone who was much of a help; almost everyone thought his completely honest statements of his purpose meant he was insane and when he revealed what he was capable of they reacted like he was a monster. (He now officially resented having things thrown at his head.) He hated rejection so much, and it hurt worse that he hadn't found even a single person that he could really _talk _to, or trust, and that was so much like his early adolesence that it hurt-

On the heel of those thoughts came footsteps, almost too quiet to hear, the steps of someone who knew how to be stealthy, but he hadn't survived for years in the deadly politics back home without being careful for potential assassins. He tensed, waiting for it to get close and pretended that he hadn't noticed. Well-trained muscles bunched in his lower back, and he breathed in so quietly it was just a faint whisper across his throat and heat flushing into his body and turning the surface under his hand to burned palmprints.

The last thought he had before the invader of his living time got too close for his properly paranoid preferences, confirming every suspicion he held, was a quiet self-assurance that nothing today was going to surprise him. (Surprise bred heisitation and heisitation bred an opening for them to hurt you.)

A sharp intake of air, a moment taken to say something, probably a deaththreat of some sort. He planted his hands on the ground, whirled around in an acrobatic blur and shoved himself onto his feet, heat and electrical arcs flashing around him, and he landed with his hands in a classic palms-out position, a look of grim determination on his face; from the newcomer, there was a sharp squeal of surprise, if nothing else.

All well and good. As expected; the people of this world hardly knew what genuine physical ability was. He, however, had expected to meet the suitably astonished expression of a thug seeking retaliation, not the altogether more pleasant sight of a large woman's chest half a hand's-span from his face.

"Um..." She said, politely puzzled, and stepped back, proving herself to be an alarmingly tall woman with a build that wouldn't be out of place for a seasoned Firebender. She didn't say anything else, she just stood there in place, tilting her head curiously.

He focused again. "What?" He snarled, glaring up at her. She just looked down at him, her brow furrowed in thought, like she was trying to think in a hurry, and he abruptly realized that he _knew _her from somewhere. It came to him; she had been there when he had appeared here, the very first thing he'd actually seen.

His curiosity piqued, he frowned thoughtfully at her, wondering what she was doing here _now_, and she just looked back, now quite nervous for some reason. After a moment, she made the second big surprise of the day (the first one being her showing up again) and said, "Your name is Zuko, right?"

He stared at her, eyebrow rising in astonishment. "...Huh?"

"You're Zuko, aren't you?"

He side-stepped, slowly and cautiously, as she adjusted her weight slightly. "Yes," He said, sizing up the enormous woman in front of him. No, he realized after a moment, not 'woman'; she was several years older than him and a lot bigger than him too, but she wasn't technically an adult by legal standards. He'd mistaken her surprising stature for age, but it was hard not to: she was the single tallest woman he had ever seen outside of statues of Avatar Kyoshi, matching even the most impressive specimens of Earth Kingdom women. He considered her tan brown skin, wondering vaugely if her people might corrospond to one of the Nations from his world and decided otherwise, though aspects of her appearance made him briefly think of the Foggy Swamp Tribe, but it was only a passing thought.

He was still wary of her, but he was admittedly curious."You're that girl from before," Zuko finally said. "How do you know my name?"

She nodded thoughtfully, biting her lip and looking a bit stressed. "Yeah, I guess we sort of already met. Not that we really talked to each other, really, but...eh, that's not important, is it? Anyway, you already told some people your name. Remember that big house fire you helped stop? Big crowd, you save a kid and kitties?" With a note of pride, she added, "I wrote an article about it, you know. I haven't gotten any decent responses yet, but it's only a matter of time! Probably."

He relaxed, very slightly. This girl was seeming like less and less of a threat. "News travels fast here, I see."

"Fast? It was a week ago! That's, like, years and stuff for media. People woulda forgotten about you if you hadn't been on fire and stuff. And I was _there_. Just barely missed ya!"

"Right," Zuko said uneasily. He was vaugely aware that the people here had develouped ways of transfering stories and moving pictures in such a way that made it seem like spirit-magic, but the whole thing spooked him enough to keep him from investigating too closely. There was an awkward silence. "Um..."

"Did you know you have a bit of a lisp?" She blurted out.

Zuko flinched, hating himself for it. Father had _hated _his lisping... "I...that's...what are you doing here? What do you want with me?"

"Huh? Oh!" She said anxiously. "I've been following your every move and examining your every action and looking for you _everywhere!_ 'Cause I, y'know, absolutely _HAD _to find you! _It's really really really important._"

"...Right," Zuko said slowly. _Why do I always get the crazy ones? _He wondered, starting to sidle away in case things got weird. Well, weirder. "Look, I kind of have to leave now and-"

"Wait, no!" She cried, moving faster than he would have credited her and getting behind him. "You can't leave! I worked forever looking for you, it was really hard, you hardly _ever _say anything when you do something and if I hadn't found that one thing you said to that roving psychotherapist that had a little nervous breakdown when you talked about your childhood I would have _never _found out that you really like sitting on high rooftops in the morning 'cause it gets you close to the sun, hah, funny thing, I'm starting to do that too but I don't know why-" She paused, a look of brief horror on her face. "No no no, I'm just freaking you out, aren't I!"

"Ugh, enough! What do you want?"

The girl stared at him for a long time, apparently trying to work that very thing out. Zuko tilted his head slightly to the side. The girl, still thinking, mirrored him with eerie precision. "Do you wanna go to a cafe and get a coffee or breakfast or something, I bet you haven't eaten real food in weeks!"

Zuko blinked. "What?"

"You said you'd been living on the streets and eating out of soup kitchens on your last interview but that was just after you started fighting people and the police were looking for you and I bet you didn't want to get reported and I don't know how you're eating but I got some money and I bet you're hungry and there's some things I _really really REALLY GOTTA TALK TO YOU ABOUT!_"

Several thoughts paraded in Zuko's head. Since he hadn't really understood most of what she said, owing to how fast she said it, he settled for the foremost one: she'd just asked him to go get something to eat. "Wait. You've been hunting me down to _ask me out on a date?_"

"Huh? Nope, sorry." She looked nervous, a bit apologetic.

Zuko frowned at her. That hadn't been a dismissive tone in her voice, only a surprised one, as though the idea hadn't crossed her mind. "I...don't get it. What do you want exactly? I'm not anybody important here."

The girl's demeanor shifted at this abrupt shift to the heart of the matter. She swallowed nervously, her face flushing abruptly, and Zuko's eyes widened at the heat shimmers around her, something she had failed to notice. _It can't be..._

"Something bad is happening to me," She said quietly, not noticing the sparks starting to ignite. "I mean, I _think _it's bad or something, it feels good, does that make sense? But I don't know what's going on, I'm scared, you know, I'm _really really _scared. I keep burning stuff I'm touching and-"

There was an igniting sound, noiseless flame, and then the smell of burning cloth. "Your hands!" He said.

"Hey, I was trying to give a heartfelt confession! You could listen for five and a half minute-"

"No, _your hands! _Look, you dimwit!"

"Huh?" She raised her hand, and yelped in shock to see it engulfed in brillant fire brightening to blue at the edges (to Zuko's own shock). "_No no no NO!_" She wailed, waving her hands around furiously in a futile attempt to put them out. "Not again not again _NOT AGAIN!_"

"Calm down, you're just making it worse!" Zuko said, a good long time of being the Firebending teacher of the Avatar himself grinding through his trepidation. "You're just feeding the fires-"

She screamed; the fires erupted into full-fledged blue flame, welling right out of her arms and consuming her sleeves in moments, the cloth on her shoulders consumed in moments. "_STOP IT!_" She cried at herself, the words not altogether sensible and starting to blubber. "_Stop it stop stoppit why won't it stop! No no no no, stop, stop, STOP!"_ The fires swam around her, like a mantle of her own, engulfing her in a private firestorm.

"Okay," Zuko said to himself, all-too-familiar blue fire washing over him but too weak to do an experienced Firebender harm. "This was unexpected..."

"_Help _me! Please!"The girl cried out to him, weeks of increasing panic and growing horror and utter isolation burning just as hot as her flames (or feeding it), and Zuko heard a trace of such painfully familiar desperation that made him heisitate (ironically, considering his earlier thoughts), and she unexpectedly blazed brighter in the extremity of her desperation and something far stranger happened, her hand briefly glowing with dragonish heat and sparks flashing around like a brillant halo around herself, beautiful and uncontrolled and in sore need of understanding.

His eyes narrowed in concentration. All thoughts of how impossibly absurd this was fled from his mind, and with a single movement, he planted a hand squarely on her shoulder, and with a subdued noise, the blue fire vanished.

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then a faint _thump_ing sound; she had fallen back in an awkward crouch, hunched over and muttering terrified apologies, the words faint and mangled. Her sleeves and pants-legs had been mostly burned away, the fire eagerly eating at the fabric even though she still held enough instinctive control not to burn herself and at least keep the fire confined to socially acceptable areas to burn. Zuko stared at her, his earlier puzzlement fading in favor of complete astonishment contained a small measure of fascinated curiosity. "I don't believe it," He said, hardly daring to breath.

"I'm sorry," The girl whispered, and again fire erupted from her hands, remaining there but burning hotter. Fear was an emotion that could fuel fire like this, Zuko remembered. He remembered it _quite _well. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don want to hurt anyone, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what I _am_, I can't...I can't..." She sniffled, and Zuko bit his lip when he saw the wetness welling up at her eyes. "_I don't know what's happening to me!_"

She let her hands fall open, the fires burning ever brighter and spreading down her arm. Without any sign of movement, Zuko's hand was suddenly gripping her's, his bruised and slightly bony fingers taking hold right in the blue-white heart of the flames without burning or reddening in the slightest.

"I do," Zuko told her.

She looked up, eyes wide and cheeks still wet. Zuko's tightened his grip, enough to give him a steady hold, and fire blossomed from his own hand, brighter and hotter and more brillant than her's, yet it mixed with her own flames, swelling up in a small but bright conflagration, spiralling up and about.

He let the flame's hold fade and they died down, still burning but less dangerously. He could see it in her eyes, the wonder at the impossible thing happening to her mixed with the pain of feeling her fires, her manifested bits of herself, extinguished. He spread his feet wide to compensate for her weight (she was even heavier than she looked and she was a big girl to begin with) and pulled her up. "On your feet," Zuko told her, and his voice had changed completely. It was no longer stern and angry, but curiously calm and gentle, the soft growls such as a dragon might offer to a hatchling learning to fly. It was strange, he reflected, to speak like that to a girl older and larger than him.

She pulled herself up, with Zuko's help, and eventually managed the nerve to look down and meet his eyes, now staring back at her with a steely calmness. She gripped his hand like a man might grip a hang-glider caught in a storm. "Please," She pleaded, still in the grip of hysteria that had surely been building for weeks now. "I don't know what's happening to me, I can help you back, I know I can, _tell me what's happening to me!_"

She squeezed his hand so tightly it hurt. Zuko almost smiled; now this was a surprise he could live with. Inexplicable, impossible on so many levels, but it was..._interesting_. And more importantly, somebody needed help. His own concerns seemed much less significant. He was Fire Lord, misplaced and lost though he was, and his birthright was duty and responsibility. "What's your name?" He asked.

"My name's Sierra," She said, almost shyly. It seemed an odd reaction from this girl, with those fires she had just displayed.

Zuko managed a brief quirk of the lips that might, in certain liberal circumstances, be considered a smile. "...You said something about breakfast, right?"

...

There was a nice cafe a few blocks over that Sierra frequented because of the free WiFi and the potential for human contact that wasn't just her mother; a good deal calmer after Zuko did something to her, muttering something about 'chi paths' and such that at least stopped the random flare-ups for a while, and she gathered that he found the whole experience frightfully awkward, though strangely the bus ride wasn't one of them. She thought it should have been.

(_"This is a bus!" She had told him loudly as they boarded the large vehicle. "We ride them to get to places so we don't have to walk or shoot ourselves out of cannons!"_

_"I _know _what a bus is," Zuko had snapped. "We have them back home! Well, not my home, exactly, they're an Earth Kingdom thing. Mainly because they're made of stone."_

_"...Oh. Then what do you have where you come from?"_

_"Giant steam-powered airships."_

_"That is so cool!")_

The two of them had seated themselves at a little booth near the window, Zuko insisting on a maximum degree of sunlight and for reasons she didn't understand yet Sierra agreed; he contentedly leaned back and let the sun warm his skin, enjoying it way more than any human ought to.

He glanced around at the cafe. It was disturbingly similar to a certain tea shop from _before_, but there were differences. There were a _lot _of things like that in this world; things so similar to his own world that he half-suspected that there had been travelers between the worlds in the past, or some strange karmic resonance between the two...but then the differences became stranger and more significant then the similarities and an awful sense of homesickness overwhelmed him, and also a sense of terrible displacement: this was _not _his world, not a place he was ever meant to be in, and the still crying remnant of the little boy he had been so very long ago wept at this fresh outrage and plead to Agni and whatever spirits might listen to a descendant of Sozin: _Why can't I go home? What is the purpose of this insanity! How can such a place BE?_

And then, he would see something else. A brief glance through the window of a child holding hands with it's mother and walking down the street. A flock of those strange fat birds flocking on the wires between the poles on the street just like the rat-doves on the roof of any Fire Nation urban center. The economic way this cafe had been designed, minimizing clutter and maximizing space and freedom of movement, so very much like the Jasmine Dragon's own design basics! A small family crowded together in the booth just in front of his, bickering good-naturedly over breakfast...

The mileu was not of his world. Every off-chance phrase, every commonality of the structures bespoke of a shared culture totally alien to him. But all the same, it wasn't _that _alien from home.

The ghost of a smile, a brief and faint quirking of his lips, made him look like the teenager he was, and not the emotional wreck his life had twisted him into.

"Hi!" Sierra said, bringing him out of his thoughtful daze. He glanced up to see her looming overhead, a tray of some sort in her hands supporting a number of containers that either contained their food or were some manner of exceptionally good-smelling purfumes. He hoped it was the former; any culture that had pre-packaged scents designed to make people smell like food had serious _issues_.

"Hey," Zuko said, looking a bit uncomfortable as she sat down on the bench opposite. This was, Sierra thought, going to be an awkward conversation, and she had a feeling that Zuko didn't have much more idea then she did how this had happened to her, but she tried not to let it on.

She just asked, "Do you like soda? I got you Dr. Plippa; not good as brand soda, I know, but it's got caffine and it tastes nice! Huh, what's a cafe doing with soda anyway?"

She passed a drink over, and Zuko eyed the straw warily before asking, "This is..._safe _to drink, right? Because I ate some what-you-call-them, nachos a few days ago and they...uh...look, it was an unpleasant experience and I don't want to have more nasty gutcramps."

"Oh, be nice, it's just soda! It won't do anything unspeakably horrible to you. Well," She added as Zuko was in the process of slowly moving the straw to his lips. "Unless it's some of that tainted batch we got last year, and then you'll turn into a zombie."

Zuko blinked innocently at her. "What's a zombie?"

Sierra paused. "Wow. You've lived a sheltered life, huh?"

"I'm a forienger. In the most literal sense of the word."

"Oh. Yeah. Um...it was just a joke. Not really good at that kind of thing, sorry."

"...No worries," He said, and took a careful sip of the soda and his eyes widened in happy surprise. "_Wow, _that's sweet! _Really _sweet!" He took another sip. "Mm, I wonder if my uncle would like this stuff? Hrm, he's so hung up on tea, but he's always open to new experiences..."

"Your uncle? What's your family like?"

Zuko froze. "...Complicated," He said after a moment. "I haven't seen my mom in a long time, and my uncle's more of a father to me than my real father ever was. My sister and father-" He stopped in mid-word and shuddered. He actually _shuddered_, like he was talking about a nightmare. "Never mind."

Sierra noticed a lot more than people expected of her, and this wasn't at all how she had expected. She'd expected someone who would be a bit more like...well, something completely out of her experience. Maybe a man whose every word was a challenge to the universe to be awesomed by him. Not this wary boy who was quitely clearly younger than her and, she was growing to realize, profoundly _broken _in some twisted and awful way, his mind all patched up with half-forgotten nightmares and hopes least he completely fall apart in a big steamy Zuko-pile, all bitter chunks and hurtful thoughts with so much hate directed at himself.

Sierra was could at identifying messed-up people. She had experience. And by the same token, she understood that his scar was obvious a sore spot with him, and she tried as hard as she could not to think about what could have done that to him. What could have possibly _burned _a boy who could walk into a fire and not be hurt?

She pushed the tray over, indicating the sandwitches she had brought for him. A trace of habitual paranoia crept from his eyes while he examined them and, after several long minutes, took a small bite out of one. He chewed, swallowed. "Interesting," He said, after a moment. "Tastes like cow-chicken."

"Tastes like what-now?"

Zuko paused. "From what I've seen of your world, explaining the particulars of my world's fauna would take a while-" He stopped. A genuinely grief-stricken look turned his face into something haunting and miserable. "...Never mind."

Sierra hated having an incomplete idea of things. There was a story here, something that _needed _to be told, but he didn't seem intent on saying anything. And she needed to know something else. Maybe though, she thought, maybe if she could earn his trust...

She swallowed and finally asked the big question. "What's wrong with me?"

"Nothing's _wrong _with you, exactly." Zuko gave her a side-long glance, as though mulling over what to say. He gave a small shrug and said, "You're a Firebender."

"...That's all?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Okay." Sierra tilted her head and drank some soda to calm her nerves. (Sugar had an inverse effect on her and ameliorated her base-level hyperactivity.) She smiled cheerfully and added, "'Cause I, y'know, thought you was going to say something confusing that I wouldn't understand! This is better!"

"You don't have to be sarcastic," Zuko said, glaring at her.

The straw dropped from her lips and she frowned at him. "I was being what-now in the hey-huh?" She asked, perfectly serious.

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose. "Okay...okay. I can see this is going to be harder than I thought." He sighed deeply. He raised a hand, as if to offer some vital point, and dropped it, frowning deeply. "I...I don't even know where to begin."

"But you're like me!" Sierra said. Zuko snorted. "You know what I mean! You do the...the..." She waved her hands about wildly. "Fire-thing, with the swoosh and the foom and the boom and the kra-kow!"

"'Kra-kow'?"

"...I may have kinda-sorta seen a clip of you shooting lightning?"

Zuko pinched the bridge of his nose again. "Wonderful. Untold millenia since the dragons taught the first of us, and the Fire Nation's sacred art is reduced to semi-incomprehensible sound effects."

"What about dragons?"

"Not important! My point is...ugh, I am so out of my experiences. I don't even know what my point is supposed to be."

"Do you need Internet stuff or something to help you figure it out?" Sierra said, trying to be gallant; it was always best to be noble and stuff when you were dealing with a fish out of water. "I think really good when I have my computer! Or something close enough."

Zuko blinked at her. "What's a computer?"

Sierra stared at him, her mouth open in horror. She put her hands over his, startling the poor boy, and made gentle hushing noise. "Oh, you _poor _fire-shooty boy, you. What monsters could have confined you in a world where you don't even know what a computer is!"

Zuko looked at her hands, a bit concerned that he couldn't move his hands now, and up at her. "Uh...I suspect I have misspoken somewhere..."

Sierra didn't appear to hear him. "Oh, now there's so much I have to do! Ooh, I can take you to an electronics place and show you stuff: education is very important and _your _education stinks!"

"I was royalty!" Zuko protested. "I had the finest education in the world! Better than any of my friends, and one of them was raised by _monks!_"

"Well, a theologically based education won't get you far in this world of machines and electronics and mass media and coffee shops!" Sierra said snootily. "Unless you belong to a machine-cult. I was in one once. But then I forgot where it was. Oh well, _Ave Machina _and all that!" She giggled.

"Could you maybe let go of my hands now?" Zuko asked. "I'm starting to lose feeling in my wrists. Again."

Sierra didn't hear him, and was now going off on another tangent. (This was a good thing, as she would have asked how he'd lost feeling in them the last time and that would have led to a very uncomfortable conversation about the time his sister had discovered the joy of torture equipment when Uncle hadn't been there.) "...And after I help you discover the joys of the worlds biggest fossilized egg roll _right here in TOWN_, we can institute a clean up of those mean jerks and thugs and habitual litterbugs. HOW I HATE THEM! And then I shall buy you a shirt that says 'Battleaxe' on it. I shall call you my battleaxe and you shall be my battleaxe! Or beamsword, you look like you'd like that a lot more. Beamswords _burn _stuff. You can't burn stuff with an axe, they have to be on fire first. Or made of lava. But then, you can't hold it, reason being you'd lose your hand! And people will make fun of you! They will call you 'Axe-No-Holding Stumpy-Hands McGee' and if your last name was McGee it would be perfectly accurate! Which it's not. You don't look like a McGee, you look more like a Asakura. Or maybe a Mustang. Ooh, or maybe a...wait, why are you banging your head on the table?"

"I'm sorry, it's just a reaction to too much stupidity."

"Wow! I didn't think you considered yourself that stupid."

Zuko twitched violently, and he took a few deep breaths, trying desperately _not _to burn the fabric under his fingers. To take his mind off things, he went to eating his sandwiches, and Sierra followed suit, eating her own share of breakfast.

A short while passed and the stupid things that had happened flowed out of Zuko's mind, though not the growing sureness that he had made a grave error in judgement in promising to help her. When he was halfway through his second sandwich, Sierra tentatively asked, "So what kind of world did you come from?"

Zuko nearly did a spit-take and he had to take a painful-looking swallow chunk of food before he managed to blurt, "WHAT? What the...what the bent spirits would make you say something like that?"

"C'mon, I know you're not from around here."

Zuko's eyes darted back and forward. "That's...uh...you're talking nonsense..."

"'Fess up, Mr. Hotman! I know you're a walk-in! What's up with that?"

"I...I...don't..." Many things struggled for dominance in Zuko's mind. Perhaps the least pernitent of them emerged as a question. "Did you just call me 'hotman'?"

"Yeppers! Sounds like a good nickname for you and stuff. Because you're...uh...a guy that does fire stuff. And you're pretty good-looking, except for your goofy curly shoes."

Zuko buried his face in his hands. "Dear spirits above, below and sideways. You went to the trouble of making her crazy as an Air Nomad and you go and make her a _Firebender_. Lousy half-assed work methology...that's it, when I die I'm going to set up a proper Celestial Bereaucracy and stop stupidness like this from happening." He paused, glaring at Sierra. "And I like my shoes. They're popular in my homeland!"

Sierra winced. "Owie. You're even more underprivileged than I thought."

"Oh, come on! I'm the _Fire Lord!_" Zuko snapped. "I'm the exact opposite of underprivileged! If anything I grew up _overprivileged! _Aside from the crushing overexpectations, wait, that's not important!"

"Overprivileged? Then explain the no knowing-computer-age."

"Don't make up words! They don't even have computers in my world...oh, damn it."

"HAH!" Sierra cheered, bouncing giddily in place. "I knew I'd make you 'fess up to it!"

Zuko face-palmed and groaned. "This is a new low in a _long _series of lows."

Sierra patted him on the shoulder. "Aw, don't be sad! You can't get any lower if you're on the floor."

"You can if you dig," Zuko retorted. Sierra just smiled sunnily; her cheerfulness seemed contagious and Zuko almost smiled, perhaps influenced by her inexplible niceness, before he forced his usual degree of grouchiness on.

Sierra didn't much approve. "Come on, why are you so serious all the time? Smile more! I bet it'd make you look proper cute."

Zuko tried not to smile at the sheer inanity of that statement. Her energy was infectious, to say the least, and he wasn't sure if that was a bad thing. "...I think I'll pass." After a moment, he cautiously said, "So...um...how'd you figure out that I'm not from around here?"

Sierra fidgeted. "You're not exactly good at hiding it. Sorry. And that first time you talked to someone and they posted it, you said some stuff about coming from a place no one had ever heard of. Since the whole 'walk-in' thing got started, I seen that all the time and I figured you were a walk-in too."

Zuko made a face. "'Walk-in'? That's gotta be the laziest term I've ever heard of."

"So what's the place you're from? The..." Sierra tried to remember what he had called. "The Flame Empire?"

"_The Fire Nation_," Zuko corrected her, and she heard a distinct note of pride in his voice.

"What's your world like?" Sierra asked curiously. "I never heard from any real walk-ins, and it'd be kind cool to hear from a real world traveler."

Zuko snorted. "I wouldn't call myself a world-traveler. I think I'm more like an accidental hitchhiker."

"Hrm?"

"Never mind." Zuko frowned. "...In my world, there are four nations...well, there's supposed to be. Anyway, the four nations have a great deal to do with the elements and the spirits that we follow, and I think they might have evolved from the influence of Benders-"

"Huh? You keep saying that word. I don't get it."

"Right, I'm getting ahead of myself. A Bender, in my world, is someone who can manipulate one of the elements of the world through a Bending Art. All of which seem to corrospond to elements of martial arts from this world, I've noticed."

Sierra was having a bit of a hard time grasping exactly what Zuko was telling her, but she was following it enough to remark, "You don't know what computers are but you get martial arts from here?"

"My point being is that the Benders each come from a single nation, and _specific _to that Nation. I'm not quite sure how it works, but each of the nations is _shaped _by the spirits of the element. I think we might have a bit of the nature of that element in our souls, or something stranger, but a mixture of genetics, spirituality and just plain luck makes someone close enough to an element to wake it up in you, so to speak."

Zuko held up four fingers. "There are four elements, which make up the fabric of the world in metaphysical ways, and therefore four nations that exemplify them. The Water Tribes that roam the North and South Poles and hold territory on some island-chains. Waterbenders exemplify change; they move with the push and flow, they adapt around it, and they use their Bending to turn things to their advantage." He dropped a finger. "The Earth Kingdom, which is the largest culture in my world. I spent a lot of time there, and I know that you can't move an Earthbender if they don't want to move; they're as strong as the Earth they stand on and just as stubborn." He lowered another finger. "The Fire Nation. _My _people. We used to be a larger empire but we pulled back to our ancestral island-homes in recent times. We draw power and loyalty from the sun, and our spirits, our hearts, are like miniature suns." He smiled faintly. "And you're a Firebender, just like me."

Sierra blinked in surprise and put a hand to her chest, as if trying to feel for a sun of her own. "You're sure?"

"...You generated flame from your chi, even if you don't realize you're doing it. Sounds like a Firebender to me." Noticing what she was doing, he added, "Don't wait or listen. Don't try to push for it; just _feel _it and you will know it," Zuko said, completely serious. Sierra frowned, and thought she could feel a warm heat from within; not physical, not something she could easily categorize. A beat and a pulse, like the echo of a bolt of lightning, or every single burst of passionate thought and every worthwhile feeling she'd ever had, packed together and made into the seed of pure elemental fire within her very soul.

Smoke came from her fingertips, only for a moment. Sierra frowned, still extremely uncomfortable with the whole 'randomly bursting into flames' bit. "...Doesn't fire just burn stuff? It destroys and kills things."

Zuko nodded sternly. "I know. But you don't quite understand fire. For a long time, just about no one in the Fire Nation did either. We fueled our Firebending with rage...hate...the darkest sides of ourselves. Fire is a lot of things, but it's _not _what we were taught it was. Fire is..." He thought hard about it, and an idea came to him. "It's _passion_, bright and hot and burning. Think about it; when you have a feeling, and you don't feel it anymore, it's not sleeping or inactive. It's gone, dead. Fire's the same way; either it burns or it simply isn't there. Burns hot or dim, a bonfire or a cinder, but it _burns _all the same. And it doesn't have to be a bad thing. Life strives, like a fire will consume anything it can and grow bigger. And fire is a fundamental expression of light." Zuko looked skward. "And what's the biggest fire in the universe except the sun!"

"And stars in general, usually a lot bigger than the sun." Sierra started to smile. "I guess you're right, Mr. Hotman."

"Stop calling me that. But you're starting to understand, even if you don't fully get it. Not yet. I spent so many years trying to Firebend and I still had to risk my life to find the teachings to do it the _right _way. Not the debased teaching the Fire Nation handed down like a bloody sword, but _real _Firebending." He said this with a clear implication that those proper teachings were ones he could pass on.

"I'm not going to have to risk my life too, am I?"

"Not unless you can find some dragons."

Sierra thought about it. "Well, I've heard some funny stuff about the Congo-"

"That was a joke."

"Oh. You kind of suck about it." She smiled. "Just like me! So that's three nations. What about the last one?"

Zuko flinched. He lowered the last finger and dropped his hand to the table. "The...the Air Nomads. They were the least numerous of all the nations. Less then ten thousand, I think, but...well, they lived in four temples set at the cardinal points of the world. They were all monks and nuns, down to the last child. They followed the wind, going wherever it went, and every last one of them was an Airbender; the more in-touch with the nature of their element, the more Benders the culture has, and the Air Nomads were monks and nuns by custom and teaching. They believed in the sanctity of life, but you'd be surprised what you could live through, or at least the old scrolls say that. And they believed in..._freedom_. It's not exactly easy for my friend Aang to explain it to the rest of us, but...he told me once, 'you can't fly if you're tied to the ground in your head'. Enlightenment was a big thing with them. So they flew to the skies, inside their heads and stuff like that."

Something troubled Sierra. "Why do you keep using the past tense? There's something you're not telling me."

Zuko heisitated. There passed over his face an expression of such horrible _guilt _that Sierra felt a bit of sympathy pain, and wondered why he would feel guilt now. "...They're gone. That's all. They're just...they're gone. At least one of them survived but...as a culture, the Air Nomads are _gone_."

"Huh? Why?"

Zuko looked haunted. "...You're better off not knowing, Sierra. Really."

Sierra observed that this was the first time he had actually said her name, and the torment in his voice was enough for her to take his advice and leave well enough alone. There was enough horror in her own family's history to know never to ask some people about certain parts of history. She wriggled uncomfortably and changed the subject. "I think I understand how all of this work," She said, not quite sure on the finer points but trusting that Zuko would explain the metaphysics eventually. "But there's one thing I don't get."

"Really? I was worried that you would find the whole thing impossible."

"Aw, I've seen _tons _of crazy stuff! Like exploding alien Cody clones full of goo." Zuko blinked, nonplussed. "But...you said that Firebenders come from the Fire Nation?"

"Yes." With one considerable exception that wasn't important for her to know about.

"I'm not! So how can I be a Firebender?"

Zuko considered this with a heavy frown. "That," He said eventually. "Is a good question. A very good question." He tapped a finger on the table in thought. "...I've heard about and seen plenty of Benders who were born, raised and taught outside of the elemental nations that their bending is _supposed _to be in."

"Really?"

"Yes. For one thing...the Foggy Swamp Tribe in the Earth Kingdom. They live in and revere the largest swamp in the entire world; a mangrove tree so massive it comprises it's own ecosystem. They've created their own style of Waterbending, based on the nature of swampwater and their own uses, but it's Waterbending nonetheless. A style that had little if anything to do with their ancestors from the Water Tribes, or the Moon and Ocean spirits. They _should _be Earthbenders, even maybe ones that manipulate the nature of earth expressed in water, like minerals, but they manipulate the water. Learned to control the water in plants. Born in Earth Kingdom, but not born to the Earth Kingdom's _spirits_. In some way, they're Water Tribe. Or the Sandbender Tribes from the Si Wong Desert; their techniques, methods and philosophies resemble _Airbender _traits more than Earthbending. Even their Bending style is more Air then Earth. And consider that they live in a massive desert, a massive landscape of sand-dunes and endless skies. That was Air Nomad territory in the ancient past."

"So, what you're saying is...um...uh...sorry, I don't know where you're going with this."

"The Foggy Swamp Tribe and the Sandbenders are both cultures in the Earth Kingdom that don't bend Earth, either at all or the way you'd expect! And consider the precursors of Firebending, the ancient Sun Warrior Tribe! They worshipped the sun like we used to and practiced Firebending forms that the Fire Nation _forgot_ in our war-frenzies! And Waterbenders that live on islands that move with the waves instead of controlling ice and snow like the Water Tribes normally do! I think...I think that if that basic principle holds true like my friend Aang told me, that the divisions of the four nations are entirely illusionary and that our Bending styles are a matter of cultural influence and spiritual guidance and _espicially _our own natures, it may well be possible for Bending prowess to spontaneously emerge in someone like you."

Sierra remembered the odd way she had felt when Zuko had arrived, and decided that she had absolutely no idea how that fit into things but decided she could figure that out later. "Really? Cool."

Zuko frowned faintly. "I'm not sure you're experiencing the properly awed feeling you should be."

"...Oooh?"

"That's better. Sort of." Zuko frowned. "What I can't understand is how this could happen in the first place. Besides the fact that you're a _lot _older than any Firebender would normally be for their first sparks. Not that you're throwing _sparks_."

Not wanting her new friend (or whatever he counted as) to think her stupid, Sierra suggested, "Maybe when you ended up here, a bit of whatever makes your world what it is slipped into mine and it changed things a bit? And maybe started Bend-ifying people with the right sort of mindsets like me?"

Zuko grunted. "Don't be ridiculous, that's-" He stopped. "...Actually, that's not a half-bad idea."

Sierra blinked. "Wait, you mean I'm _not _completely crazy? I might be _right?_ Wow. That's freaky."

Zuko nodded. "I barely even know you and I can still acknowledge the import of the situation."

"Wait, was that an insult? I can't tell." Zuko shrugged. "Oh well. Maybe...how did you get here anyway?"

Zuko grimaced. "Well..." And thus did Zuko tell Sierra the story of how his grand arrival into her world happened. It pretty much went like this:

_"Hey," Zuko said, in the middle of a number of inexplicably ancient ruins on an island that no one could remember being there before. "Look what I found!"_

_Sokka, a young man of the Southern Water Tribe, peered at it and sneered. "Congratulations. You found the world's oldest hoop. All made of stone and stuff."_

_Zuko frowned. The 'hoop' was a large edifice roughly in the shape of a massive hollow ring, strange images lining it's edges. "You don't have to be so excessively sarcastic." He walked over to a plinth that, as it would transpire, proved to be a control panel. "I think I can see some letters on this thing. And...a switch or something? Hard to tell, it's so complicated looking."_

_"Don't touch anything!" Warned Aang, the last Air Nomad. "I've heard tons of stories like this! It's just like picking up large glowing gemstones in pedestals, YOU DON'T DO IT. Half the time, the ancient relics are secret spirit works and if you mess with them, they're propell to strange and bizarre worlds filled with adventure! Only with our luck we'll end up in the kind of place where everything's trying to kill us."_

_"How is that different from our usual lives?" Toph, the world's great Earthbender and only Metalbender asked sardonically. "You know, aside from the frequent crushing failure."_

_"Don't be so negative," Zuko said. He frowned. "It sounds really strange, me saying that." He noticed an inviting looking thing on the control panel. "Hey, what do you supposed this does?" He asked, pushing it._

_There was a loud and exceedingly ominous _click_._

_"Huh," Zuko said as mysterious instruments glowing and moved about on their own. "I wasn't expecting that to happen."_

_There was a roar of wind, and Aang was suddenly by him. "WHAT DID I JUST TELL YOU!" Aang demanded. "Don't touch anything! It's not that hard, you just don't TOUCH ANYTHING!"_

_"You don't need to be so snippy about it-" Zuko stopped. The hoop thing was slowly spinning in place now, and if he knew was a wheel of fortune looked like he would have thought that it bore an uncanny resemblence to one right now. The little symbols on the edges were now glowing brightly. "Uh. What's happening?"_

_"You're an idiot," Sokka said. "You know that, right?"_

_"Possibly."_

_The others came running over as the flashes of light became much more powerful, a loud rumbling echoed as though the universe was twisting a bit, particularily in the middle of the hoop. "What is happening?" Demanded Zuko's uncle Iroh, a somewhat short but broad older man. (With a totally awesome beard.)_

_"He did it!" Sokka, Toph, Katar and Aang said, pointing at Zuko._

_Zuko grimaced. "Just because _I _made this happen, you assume it's my fault." He blinked. "Wait a minute...ah, it is, then."_

_The light shone forth, whitewashing everything around them into lines and curves half-visible from the light. And in that light, they saw everything. All that could be, they saw. All that had ever been, they saw that as well. And, but for a moment, they all saw the shape of how it all came together._

_If it had gone on longer, it would have been a moment of perfect cognition, the beginings from which true enlightenment is found. Unfortunately, the edifice-ring ceased it's revolutions, unnoticed in the glare of the light shining forth, a single glyph-shape lit up and practically invisible amid all the light around._

_There was a nasuating feeling of _doubling_, that they were standing on the stony floor _here _and also on a multitude of surfaces _there_, and there came a sudden wrenching. And then, all sensation was gone. The light faded, and with it came the Avatar and those standing with him._

_A rift had opened, and just as suddenly closed. All was silenced there, as it had been for countless ages._

_The island upon which this had all transpired went on, and there were none left who could explain._

"...And that's what happened," Zuko concluded.

"How'd you know about the bits that happened after you left?" Sierra asked.

"Artistic license. My mom took me to plays all the time as a kid, I know how this thing is supposed to be narrated."

"Oh." Sierra tilted her head thoughtfully. "So, basically you and your friends were snooping around in a spooky ancient ruin that no one remembered being there before and you go and _pushed a button?_"

"It was a perfectly logical idea at the time!" Zuko protested. "How was I supposed to know that it would make something bad happen?"

"I don't know, a big sign that says _here lieth shmuck bait!_ What did you think would happen, huh? You _said _your mom took you to plays! Didn't you learn so much as a single trope?"

"What is a _trope_!"

Sierra paused. "You know, I'm not really sure, but they're...you know, a thing. In the nature of things. And stuff. Yeah. Seriously, don't you have any common sense? Geez. At least you didn't read any mysterious books with spooky images on it upon awful alters of things man was not meant to know of."

Zuko paused. "...Well, actually, there was this _one _book I found at some other ancient ruins a few weeks before-"

"_OH, COME ON!_"

"What? I couldn't even read it, it was in some dead langauge!" Sierra just face-palmed in exasperation. "So. If you know about that kind of stuff, than what happened to us?"

Sierra considered it. "Well, guessing by the stuff you saw and that button you oh-so-foolishly pushed-"

"Not something else I'll never live down!"

"-I'd say you probably stumbled onto the artifacts of an alien civilization. Or an alien outpost. Something with aliens, where the very architecture is technological. Or something. Yeah. And that big spinny-thing was probably a rift-gate. You pushed the button, it opened up a rift right here and scooped you in! And here you are."

"I...see."

Sierra thought of something. "You know, it's a funny thing, but I remember that my sort of-friend Heather said she found something when we were digging around in Area 51 for alien artifacts that, going by what she said, looked a LOT like the thing you messed with. Only a lot smaller. She turned it on, and it had a lot of goo inside it, but maybe that was enough to, I don't know, make a portal thingie that your giant rift-gate locked onto?"

Zuko blinked, looking like he was in pain. "I want to discount that out of hand, but I'm just not in a position to do that. And I don't even understand half of what you were just talking about."

Sierra giggled. "Won't the cross-cultural comparisions be _fun?_"

Zuko's eyebrow twitched in such a way that he was going quietly mad at the very thought. He sighed deeply. "Speaking of that...there's something I need to know." His brow furrowed. "Could my friends still be on this world?"

Sierra paused. "...Yes?" She said hopefully.

Zuko closed his eyes. Sierra saw his hands shaking, where he thought she wouldn't see, and she could hear the deep breaths he was taking to stay calm. Here was a boy on the verge of completely unraveling at the seams, so scared of this _loss _that he might go mad with the fear of it. He let out a few ragged, shuddering breaths and finally said, "...I will find them."

That was all. Four little words. Not a statement or a promise. It was a declaration; he had just informed the universe _it shall be thus_, and he was basically daring it to get in his way. Sierra found it a bit hard to return the steely look he hat, to meet his burning yellow eyes, and they _were _burning, slightly aglow with a warm and fierce light, sparks flickering behind his teeth.

She smiled. His determination was infectious. "Well, you don't know they're not here!" She said cheerfully. "I can help you find them."

He looked up at her eyes, and eventually raised an eyebrow. "Why? I already told you I was going to help you, you don't need to make me a deal over it."

His tone was practically a challenge. Sierra's brow furrowed. "I need a reason to help you? Why's that?"

Zuko stared at her, his eyes wide in surprise, and then he smiled. It was a oddly disarming expression, his smile coming out of nowhere and taking place on his face like it would stay forever and completely transforming his, diminishing his disfigurement and making the whole of his face into something lovely. "Okay," He said, extending his hand forward across the table. "I teach you how to handle Firebending. You help me find my friends. No debts owed."

Sierra grinned and said, "Okay, you got it!" and grasped his hand, neatly cupping his hand in her's and gasping at the sheer _heat _of him, warm and hot and _nice_. Spurred on by the heat (_and a flicker from deep within, her very spirit burning brighter at the blazing spirit of the Fire Lord himself_), she added, a trifle shyly but honestly, "I won't let you down, I promise!"

A flicker of stunned recognition made Zuko's smile a touch wider. "No," He said, as though he'd heard this before and knew how the story would go. "You won't, will you?"

Time, as it does, would pass. The sky would spin in it's currents, wild and free. The moon would orbit the earth, pulling the tides in their eternal rhythms. The mighty tectonic plates of the Earth itself would grind imperceptibly on, but mighty enough to withstand the lightning and the storm alike. And above it all, the Sun burned.

And none but those who knew how to see it properly would know that a fragment of the world flush with the might of the spirits had escaped into this one.

And, just perhaps, enough to find a means to make a way back.

...

A/N: This took me a few weeks to write. I'm honestly embarrased about that. I intended to knock out something in a night, maybe a few days (like I did with my first Coderra story) and what I intended to be a fairly simple crossover one-shot expanded into a slightly frustrating project. On the bright side, it's possible that the ideas here can be expanded into a future series!

The exact mechanics of what happened and why Zuko (and possibly the rest of Team Avatar) came to Total Drama Earth are left vauge on purpose, in case I come up with an cooler idea later on and don't want to contradict myself, or else expand on what's already here.

Regular readers may recognize a few ideas from my on-going story 'Kingdom Crossovers'; namely the question of people suddenly becoming Benders and not being from Zuko's world, Team Avatar traveling to another world and trying to get back home, some of my thoughts about Bending in general. (A lot of it is owed to such awesome Avatar: The Last Airbender stories like Embers and Another Brother, which put a lot of thought into it.) To be clear, this one-shot and anything that might come from it has nothing to do so far with any of my other stories, except possibly No Excuses; Team Avatar went to a _lot _of other worlds, none of them Total Drama Earth, right up until they found Nicktoons-Earth. At which point, as they say in the vulgate, 'the shit hit the fan'.

Zuko and Sierra make a great odd couple. Not romantically, though you could certainly see it that way if you want to. (Me? I'm a hardcore Coderra and Maiko shipper.) They played off each other surprisingly well, and I like the idea of doing more stories about them.

I was worried that maybe the plot, or lack there of, would be a problem. I got over this problem by glossing over the whole thing and making it a Plot What Plot-type story; the circumstances of Zuko's appearance in Sierra's world is less important than getting them to meet each other. Charactarization is my real strength, I've been told, so I decided to focus on that for this one-shot and not give myself a headache.

I have put some prior thought into what types of benders the Total Drama kids would be. I figure Sierra would be a Firebender, owing to how passionate and driven she is. (And I picture Cody as an Airbender. Imagine the implications of that, given what the Fire Nation did to the Air Nomads!)

I'm worried that Sierra seemed a bit OOC during her meltdown bit with Zuko, so I tried to portray her increasing desperation as hitting a point right then. (In the original draft, the reason for doing so was Zuko trying to run off, making her have a Freak Out. His various reasons for doing so seemed a bit selfish and whiny, so I changed it.)

I just realized, this is the most sensible and least Crackfic of anything I've written. A bit worrying, that.


End file.
